Leeks - the Co-Op Way

The Spring 2009 No.8 ORGANICThe journal of the Organic GROWER Growers Alliance IN THIS ISSUE Vegetables with News - our 2nd AGM and more ................2 purpose The organic market report ..........................9 Organic growers are a hard-working bunch, that’s obvious. When gathered together, besides the partying which happens now and again, Unweaving the web ..................................11 they like to talk about growing. That should be obvious too, to anyone The economics of growing by hand ..........12 who reads this magazine. Perhaps because most have come to land work from something else and appreciate its otherness, its difference to the Crop planning - nightmare or salvation ..14 dominant urban-centred culture, they generally seem to take a searching view of their work and its responsibilities. And there is nowhere to hide Leeks - the co-op way ................................16 when you are a grower, what you do is in the open. Producing foodstuffs that go naked and unadorned from your land to the kitchen of their Chickweed - in profile ...............................19 purchasers, you are in some sense presenting yourself to the world. See those ranks of anonymous fruits and vegetables shivering in the Flaming weeds ..........................................22 small part of the supermarket set apart for nudity? Even they, scrubbed Pastures new, fingers crossed ..................26 and labelled, have something to say about themselves and those who produced them – while most of the rest of the store, muffled in packaging, Growing fruit trees on their own roots ....28 is silent as a tomb. There is the soil too, the source of life. No one needs to understand it Postcard from Korea .................................30 so well or has a closer relationship with it than a vegetable grower. So one way and another organic growers take a profound interest in what HDRA to Garden Organic ......................32 they do. Often this extends to appreciating the context within which they Self portrait - Fenella’s Garden ................37 work, the interaction between working the land and issues of equity, consumption, energy use and so on – all the various facets that make up Letters .......................................................38 environmental responsibility in its widest sense. In short – they care not just about the practice but also the principle of the thing. Fieldnotes and queries ..............................40 Unfortunately the organic market is now so wide and so diverse that principle does not always get much of a look-in. Or it may be that the Nature notes .............................................41 very width and universality of the market means that different principles apply in different places within it. Most growers within the OGA will Cabbage comment .....................................42 have an understanding of what “organic” means, derived from their Events .......................................................44 experience of how the soil functions and how organic techniques work in practice. This will owe something, directly or not, to the work of Howard Page 1 - The Organic Grower - No 8 - Spring 2009 and Balfour and others who saw and explained that the future of agriculture lies in working within the whole of the cycle of fertility, instead of taking it to bits and fashioning it to our reductionist science. To farm organically is to understand that the carbon cycle, whereby atmospheric carbon is fixed through photosynthesis and NEWS transferred to the soil as organic matter, is sufficient in itself. It can be encouraged, but cannot be improved on. Go to Hardwick and The 2nd Annual General Meeting - you will see the truth of this made plain. Penpont, Brecon What the public, and indeed many producers, understand by The vernal equinox is a gateway to the new season and so a timely organic is usually something quite different. The unprincipled day on which to hold the OGA’s annual meeting – last season message focuses on the nature of the inputs– that to be organic is overlain by anticipation of the new, but still before the urgency to not use all the nasty things that other farmers use. This is easy of spring work makes leaving the holding unthinkable. Often to understand and has a direct appeal to people’s self-interest in stormy, this equinox was balmy – the limpid sunlight heartening avoiding substances that might do them harm, but it misses the the awakened earth, and the further into the Welsh hills the balmier heart of organic practice. It signifies only a partial distinction which it got. can be chipped away at by non-organic but self-professed ethical regimes – conservation grades, IPM and LEAF programmes and The venue would have been hard to improve on. Penpont House the like. is a comely, four-square and almost modestly sized mansion, built in the seventeenth century, remodelled in the eighteenth. In some parts of the world organic standards are more about the It lies on the level floor of the Usk Valley, where the grounds of nature of the inputs used than any virtuous cycle underlying the house are well planted with fine trees, young and old, and production. Even in the UK, where standards are founded on the Brecon Beacons rise up on either side. Our hosts, Gavin and what we understand as the fundamentals of organic agriculture, Davina Hogg, were wonderfully welcoming and generous in their the ingenuity of the agricultural supply trade knows few bounds hospitality. Starting out with a tasty lunch in the dining room we in introducing endless variations on the theme of an acceptable returned there for tea and cake after the meeting. By the end of input for every need. When organic agriculture goes this way it the day Davina had also provided a dinner for thirty one assorted begins to resemble a mirror image of what it set out to change. organic growers, more than half of whom were then comfortably As regulation strives to reduce the threats to the environment billeted around the house. To say nothing of breakfast to come. and human health by outlawing the direst of chemical inputs we may all, organic and non-organic, end up using the same range of The meeting itself was held on the lawn in front of the house. We “biological crop protection products”. Then it will be no surprise dragged chairs out from the dining room and elsewhere, and sat if the public wonders what it is paying for. in the sunshine with the youthful Usk burbling pleasantly in the near background. Growers may feel despair that the meaning of “organic” exemplified on their holdings is becoming diluted elsewhere, and even losing its force in the market place. What we have on our side are qualities that arise from what we do and the way we do it. Some marketing is about selling your honour and integrity first, and the product after it. As we produce basic necessities of life out of the most basic of materials, we can sell what we produce through the honour and integrity of what we do. We have too a purpose, a sense of where we are in the scheme of things. These are qualities we can present to our public, along with our vegetables. Should you get this in time . Photo: Phil Sumption Phil Photo: SA licensees! – last AGM chance to vote for Following his introduction and welcome to the forty members Farmer and Grower attending (admittedly a few were too late to hear it), chairman Board. Ballot closes Alan Schofield talked about how he felt that the OGA had “grown up” over the last year, the Alliance responding and dealing with May 29th. several real issues very effectively. The problems of manure contamination and the subsequent banning (for now at least) of Page 2 - The Organic Grower - No 8 - Spring 2009 aminopyralid was, he thought, the most poignant and crucial. So Patrick Lynn had notified their willingness to stand for membership far as the OGA’s relationship with the Soil Association and SACL of it. Both were duly appointed. (which certifies the majority of growers) is concerned - both he and Under Any Other Business the suggestion was made that OGA committee member Pete Richardson have been appointed charitable status would have advantages over our present to the SA’s Farmer and Grower board. This will significantly Community Interest Company status as there is a possibility of strengthen our voice in the activities and decision making of the charitable funding which would allow the OGA to expand its SA. Compliments were made to James Clapp for all the work he activities. There was also a call for the OGA to have a presence has put into last year’s events and this year’s programme, and also at more AGMs of relevant bodies (e.g. the SA, Garden Organic). to The Organic Grower and its editors. There was strong agreement that this would be desirable and Treasurer Debra Schofield told us that membership was currently that expenses for OGA delegates to attend such events could be 168, a rise of a third on a year ago. She showed that income and budgeted for. expenditure were balanced and that the membership fee remained Before the meeting closed Roger Hitchings, who is chairman of adequate to cover operating expenses, which chiefly consist of the ACOS Technical Committee, gave a run through of what’s funding the magazine and website. Events are self-funding while new in the world of organic standards since the introduction of office expenses are minimal and the committee cheap to keep, the new EU regulation in January. While this had yet to have as its members have so far not claimed the up-to £50 expenses much or any impact on OGA members there are issues to be for each meeting allocated to them at the last AGM.

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